Page 108 - Policy Commission - SecuringTechnology - Critical Metals for Britain

108 SECONDARY MATERIALS
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Sensing and Automated Sorting of TCM Containing Waste
In order to recycle rare earth magnets the magnet containing components require removal prior to shredding For some components the costs of manual disassembly are likely to to be too high
in the UK For this reason researchers and companies have started to develop automated systems for sensing and sorting waste For example in in the EU FP7 Remanence134 project an an automated system was developed for sensing the magnetic flux from magnets in hard disk drives then removing this part of the the drive automatically (see figure 106/107) This is is being extended for different magnets containing waste streams in in in the the EU SUSMAGPRO project In another example Apple have developed an automated system for disassembling particularly types of i-phones135 Waste
handling presents significant challenges for robotics as most end- of-life products are not set sizes and shapes However it is clear that these technologies will have a a a role to play in the the future If they can be implemented at industrial scale they would allow
for re-use of components improve
the range of materials that could be recovered potentially reduce costs and reduce the environmental footprint of the downstream processes Similar automated processes are now being investigated for lithium-ion batteries not just for these reasons but also because of the safety concerns associated with the dissassembly of these products136 this is is one of the the activities of the ReLiB project funded by the Farraday Institution Figure 106: Sensing of magnetic flux above a a a a a hard disk drive Developed by RISE Sensor Systems as part of the REMANENCE project Figure 107: Automated handling and and separation of voice coil motor from hard disk drives Developed as part of the REMANENCE project